Of course, the problem is that there are many different reasons why things are collected and kept. I still have the stress ball from an IT convention from many years ago largely because it was the only time I’ve been to a place giving those out: it was unique. A few years ago I remember one stand being swamped because they had cute little pens and those were kept for a while ’til the likes of IKEA started handing similar things out: another unique item. Then there’s the personal reasons: I still use the promo keychains or rather keychain, singular, given with the £60,000 computer system I bought almost 15 years ago basically as a reminder of how daft the procurement people were at that time. I’m quite sure it’s the most expensive keyring in our street!

That unique quality is something worth searching for in items that you give away but requires you to move outside the standard catalogues and make that little bit more effort.

In principle, it should really matter which we go to as the competition should level out any pricing differences given that they’re so close to each other. Well, perhaps in principle but in practice there are major differences in the pricing.

Thus we do almost all our shopping in one of those supermarkets and largely ignore the other one. That in turn seems to seriously confuse the marketing algorithm that the loyalty card system in the lesser used supermarket uses. Every time we go (which works out at maybe a couple of times each month) we get what seems like a crazy offer from them yet when we go back to use that offer we don’t get anything comparable afterwards.

Now, I can understand that tactic being useful when a supermarket opens as a way to attract customers from the other supermarket. Why they do it getting on for ten years on is something of a mystery though.

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.

That said, this is one of the first times that your child will be making their mark on the social calendar of life and so it’s worth putting that little bit more effort into the event. From the perspective of others that’s probably going to start with the invitation that they’ll receive which very much sets the scene for the event for them.

Naturally, you’ll want to continue the theme throughout the event as much as you can to make it a truly memorable time for all who participate in it but remember that it’s the first contact with the invitees that really sets the tone for the party.

Although the hotel might be high the prices certainly aren’t. Typically for Las Vegas you get relatively low prices for extremely high quality hotel experiences. Yeah, I know, “hotel experiences” sounds very marketing-speak but in Vegas they take into account the whole deal rather than just having a decent mattress and a couple of freebies in the room so it’s very much the whole experience that ends up high quality rather than just some individual items as you’d find in other destinations.

Combined with the height of the building, the rides available are themed with altitude in mind so this probably isn’t the hotel to go to if you’re not too keen on heights.

However, the toys that they see on the adverts themselves aren’t the only thing altering their desires in terms of toys as many of the programmes themselves are end to end product placements and merchandising. Probably the worst of these at the moment is Hanna Montana which is probably the largest advertisement that the world has ever seen. I can side-step that particular one as I’ve just got boys but given the success that it’s seen I’m sure that there’s a similar effort planned for little boys too.

What you do need of course is a balance in the toys that you get. Thus you don’t want to be ending up buying only computer games for example. Ideally you should end up with a mix of indoor and outdoor toys, a mix of educational and purely fun ones, etc. Hard to achieve certainly but it’s worth keeping that idea of a balance in your mind when you’re out looking for them.

For instance, how many people would think about getting a custom rubber stamp these days? Not so long ago it would have been very rare to come across a company that didn’t have loads of stamps with their logo on them yet nowadays it’s equally rare to find a company that does anything other than use computer graphics to print off their stationery and so there are few rubber stamps around with the logo on them.

But forgetting that “old technology” is a mistake. There are lots of places that you can stamp your logo which you’d simply not be bothered to print using the computer and that’s lots of opportunities for marketing that you’re missing out on in the absence of a simple rubber stamp.

Just a few years ago typically those in government information security roles were, by and large, generalists who had the security function bolted on by way of a fairly small number of specialist training courses. However, with the rise in the profile through media attention on various incidents that’s rapidly becoming a non-runner and thus there’s been a fairly rapid rise in the number of university masters courses on the topic.

Why not ordinary degrees? Essentially that’s because those getting into information security are generally very experienced and many of them already have degrees in the computer field. One suspects also the fact that the universities can charge more for a masters course has a certain amount to do with the level of degree too.

Is it just a flavour of the month though? In the sense it is in that a lot of the raising of the profile has arisen from the bad press that the various incidents created. However, those incidents are, to some extent, a reflection of the sheer volume of information that’s knocking around these days and that can only get worse as the power of computers increases.

However, that difference also exists in junior vocabulary too thus whereas we’d be looking for Scalectrix cars, the larger marketplace over there means that there are many trade names so it’s necessary to give the things a non-trade name and ask for Carrera slot cars for instance to cover the various trade names on offer for the things.

Although the adult vocabulary is largely converging between the two varieties, one suspects that it will take a while before the junior words and phrases converge as there’s currently next to no crossover in the advertising for them outside the big names.

Whilst I wouldn’t by any means call myself a fashion pundit, I think that it’s still a fairly new phenonmen to see sexy hosiery in the form of rubber look leggings on the legs of relatively non-fetish women. One wonders how long it’ll take for them to work their way through all the peculiarities of that particular line of clothing.

Seriously though, it’s quite typical of the move of what our parents would have been really shocked to see on any kind of girl, more or less into the mainstream (if a glance at the windows of many highstreet outlets is anything to go by).